Monthly Archives: June 2012

A delicate marriage, he calls it. Most are, I'd say, excepting maybe Edward Albee's hapless George and Martha.

The Annabel sofa:

I suppose it's a marriage that could explain the work of all designers. For the most part, I suspect it's more of an open marriage. Boontje believes his designs are contemporary without forsaking tradition and that technology shouldn't "abandon people and senses." He also believes the emotionality of his work comes in part from his use of natural forms, the flower and plant motifs. Unlike the way nature was used in Art Nouvea, Boonjte uses nature more as a graphic reference rather than a structural one. It overlays his work and adds layers. It may be the vestigial expression of his childhood ambition to go into forestry.

Above, Doll House chairs; below, End Revolution chair:

Boontje revisits the Arne Jacobsen Egg chair (1958):

The Little Field of Flowers rug:

Born and raised in Enschede, the Netherlands, Boontje left his homeland to attend graduate school in London and stayed on to establish his professional career. He's since relocated to Bourg-Argental, France.

The Fig Leaf wardrobe:

L'Armoire wardrobe:

Boontje describes his work:

It is layered. The layers shift, sometimes its really pretty and uplifting, sometimes its more dark and scary like a scary story, like an alfred hitchcock film! Sometimes its very floral and sometimes its much cooler and reduced and abstract.

The flower images on the table top below aren't silk screened or stenciled but are actual pressed flowers:

He's created skins for HP computers and iPhones:

Moving toward the abstract, the Summer Trees commode:

A collection of Ceiling lamps: They're called Future Flora but they could just as well be Future Fauna for the insect-like appearance.

Clearly, Boontje is a big fan of Enzo Mari as demonstrated with his Rough and Ready collection. This utilitarian DIY furniture is a response to sustainability and "urban situations." It's intended to be made from salvaged or cheap materials and its unfinished "incompleteness" is wholly intentional. Design need not be elitist or unattainable for those who desire it, a sentiment that both Mari and Boontje share.

Below, he explores more finished work.

A neatly disguised cabinet:

The Stitched chair: You can't see it here but there is yarn stitched through the eyelet style holes.

An example of the reduced and cooler industrial vibe: The Nest armchair.

Boontje is also a big fan of Gaudi—which may partly explain the chair above—the victorian period, the arts and crafts movement, and Israeli industrial designer and architect Ron Arad.

The outdoor Shadowy deck chair:

Boontje has other ambitions as well. He'd love to design a hotel and maybe do a film featuring Madonna or Goldfrapp or even Grimm Brothers' fairy tale.

A view from his Shoreditch, London store:

It seems the hue we think of as teal tends to be more of an umbrella term than a specific color. We know it's generally considered blue-green but it can run the gamut of light blue to greenish gray. One person's teal may be another person's turquoise.

As colors tend to have faddish runs in design culture, teal had a brief one of its own recently. Teal is also a classic hue that never goes out of fashion.

The word itself comes from the Teal duck which displays the color on its head. Also below, a tropical sea, peacock feather, satellite view of a plankton bloom, and an agate rock give further proof of nature's own predilection for the hue.

In an environment of neutrals teal bangs up nicely.

Subject to the cycles of fashion Teal is also a classic that never goes completely out of fashion. Land's End and Abercrombie & Fitch will always have space for teal in their catalogs.

Part of teal's success as a fashion color has to do with its complimentary effect on the natural pinks of light skin. As you can see above, it seems to work with skin of any tone.

More teal and neutrals interplay:

Teal pumping up the vibe of an office space.

In a more traditional, low key setting:

And the slightly more garish:

Congratulations to Sean and Knibb Design for winning the Jury Award for A-Frame in the 2012 AIA/LA Restaurant Design Awards.

The second Jury Award went to Beechwood (now Sunny Spot on Washington Blvd). Our more savvy readers may recall that Sean also did some of the landscape there including the glass encased garden in the restaurant's interior.

Thanks to all who voted for us. It was a great honor.

See the official announcement here.

We're now in the full ripeness of June. The newborn baby blue skies and just-unfurling leaves... full of infant chlorophyll are past now.

The adolescent blooms of summer are more mature and wizened. The last burst of arrogance before humility retakes them again in fall.

Outside the youth center, between the liquor store
and the police station,
a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;
overflowing with blossomfoam,
like a sudsy mug of beer;
like a bride ripping off her clothes,
dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds...

... so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
... It’s been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.

Last summer’s song is making a comeback on the radio,
and on the highway overpass,
the only metaphysical vandal in America has written
MEMORY LOVES TIME
in big black spraypaint letters,

which makes us wonder if Time loves Memory back.

What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle.
What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel.
What I thought was an injustice
turned out to be a color of the sky.

Wishing everyone a wonderful summer to come.

All words in italics from the poem "A Color of the Sky" by Tony Hoagland.

A pool is the eye of the garden in whose candid depths is mirrored its advancing grace.
Louise Bebe Wilder

Take that "mirror of grace" and add to it the spectacle of a view and you may just have paradise.

Topiary, the art of clipping and training plants into desired shapes, has origins dating back to Roman times. The first records of topiary come from the Greeks but the word itself is from the Latin (topiarius). Romans displayed topiary in tomb paintings and there may've been some Persian influences as well. It's also likely that something similar was going on contemporaneously in China. The Japanese borrowed forms from China and started a tradition of their own.

We tend to think of topiary as plants shaped into whimsical forms, like animals and such, but this occupies only a small part of a long tradition. It was a Roman, poet Cneus Matius, who is credited with bringing topiary to the attention of Caesar Augustus. (Roman emperors have a history of having their predilections make epic impressions on world culture—think Constantine and Christianity.)

Once characteristic of the grandest European gardens, interest in topiary would wane, partly by vandalism and partly religious oppression: The great Roman gardens would be destroyed by the invading barbarian hordes in their zeal to destroy the Empire. The Dark Ages would have a profound effect on garden aesthetics, as pleasure gardens were repurposed as places to consider to contemplate God's power and not human vanities. Interest in pleasure gardens would return during the Renaissance in great part due to cultivation of herbs, flowers, and shrubs in monastery gardens throughout Europe. Geometric shapes were most prevalent, simple cubes, orbs, cones, and obelisks. The Victorian era would see another resurgence.

Traditional grandeur, above and below, at the gardens of Château-de-Villandry, France:

A hedge is a simpler, functional form of topiary intended to create boundaries, walls, or screens.

Below, hedges form an extension of the manor's heroic architecture.

Or a castle hall:

And more modern treatments:

The severe serenity of the well ordered Japanese garden:

Two view of the gardens at the Trentham estate, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire:

The title is from this Langston Hughes poem.

Grasses are sensual. You can smell them and hear them and watch them move. Meadows are sexy, just like lovers they never stop changing, never ceasing to surprise.

John Greenlee

That sensuousness can be seen in the way grass moves in the breeze. How it blooms robust with color in the spring and goes dormant brown in the winter: As Greenlee might say, they're the essence of sex and death.

Grass is dynamic. It gives texture and balance, it can be sharp or fluffly. It's an ensemble player, a backgrounder, accompanist, or virtuoso soloist if need be. Its culturally polyglot: It's Asia, Africa, the Mediterranean, and the American heartland. It's tropical, jungle, desert, lush, dry, sparse, and dense.

Below, the work of Washington D.C. based James Van Sweden:

Layers:

Meadows:

In contemporary gardens, it is the quintessential modern material.

More James Van Sweden:

It works in the meadow; it works in a pot:

Piet Oudolf's Trenthan Gardens:

The image of the transparent eyeball* has become a staple of nature mysticism: in the midst of wild Nature, the self becomes one with being... differentiation, alienation and struggle cease.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Below, hillocks in a field in Kyrgyzstan:

Hillock is a British term referring to small hills or knolls. This, along with hummock, are terms used more commonly to refer to bumpy terrain, such as the above which shows the effect of grazing animals on moist soil. These mounds can also form out of sediment collecting around decaying plants through water from rain, snow, tides wind, etc, as often seen in wetalands.

Soil covered ancient shell mounds in Palo Alto, California:

These, from Iceland:

Hillocks and hummocks have served as inspiration in design as well. Emerson's idea of the transparent eyeball was about absorbing nature, becoming its vessel and disappearing into its grandeur. Before nature we are nothing but spiritual antennas for the divine. Picking up that broadcast has taught us something about aesthetics too.

Maya Lin's Storm King Wavefield in Mountainville New York was built over a former gravel pit which covers 240,000 sq ft and peaks at 15 ft in height.

Her work is also reminiscent of grazing lines left by cattle:

Life Mounds by architectural theorist, writer, and landscape architect Charles Jencks. This work is one of the commissioned pieces featured in the sculpture garden Jupiter Artland.

Lin's Wave Field at the University of Michigan, 1995:

A Danish landscape architect known best for his urban spaces, Stig L. Andersson admits an influence of Japanese culture. He calls it an integration of substance, space, and changeability. He goes bumpy as well.

Tufts:

The Jardim Das Ondas by Joao Gomes da Silva, Lisbon Portugal:

The legendary gardens at Marqueyssac:

*Yes, the transparent eyeball concept was inspired from a recent episode of Mad Men.